March 10, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Delay By Sadie Stein Photo via 6sqft When we have to change an opinion about any one, we charge heavily to his account the inconvenience he thereby causes us. ―Friedrich Nietzsche I was riding a train the other day that came to a halt between stations. After a few moments, there was an announcement over the loudspeaker: the conductor explained that there had been “a pedestrian strike” down the line, and they’d inform us when they knew more. I guess some people weren’t paying attention. After a while there was a rumble of discontent and querulous voices, and this one man started prowling the aisles trying to meet people’s eyes in outraged commiseration. Even absent the announcement, this was premature grounds for bonding; we hadn’t been stalled that long. Read More
March 10, 2015 At Work New Lovers: An Interview with Paul Chan By Jennifer Krasinski Paul Chan is best known as a multimedia artist, writer, and activist, but in 2010 he added publisher to his long list of achievements when he founded Badlands Unlimited, an imprint with a mission that embraced changes in the way books are created and circulated: “We make books in an expanded field.” Chan’s modest house boasts a list rich in writing and ideas. In its brief history, it’s published, among others, Calvin Tomkins’s collected interviews with Marcel Duchamp, Yvonne Rainer’s poems, Saddam Hussein’s speeches on democracy, and a monograph of curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist’s notes and hand-drawn diagrams. This year, Chan and his Badlands coconspirators—Ian Cheng, Micaela Durand, and Matthew So—launched the first three titles of New Lovers, a series of erotic novels written by women for a new generation’s sexual imagination. In Lilith Wes’s We Love Lucy, a young woman throuples up with her best friend and his boyfriend; Wednesday Black’s How to Train Your Virgin tells of a queen in a colorful, fantastic realm who tries to win back the lust of her king; and in God, I Don’t Even Know Your Name, Andrea McGinty tracks a young artist’s worldwide sexual adventures after she begins using a new dating app called Bangly. In short, the books are intended to be colorfully hot reads for the thinking pervert. I met with Chan to talk about New Lovers a few weeks ago in his airy, light-filled studio in Industry City, Brooklyn. He and his team were in the final stages of completing work for “Nonprojections for New Lovers,” Chan’s solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, organized in honor of his winning the 2014 Hugo Boss Prize. To my surprise, Chan was utterly cool and calm considering the coming storm. Badlands Unlimited largely publishes art books. How does erotica fit into your mission? From the very beginning, one of the models for Badlands has been Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press, which was one of the craziest, most vanguard presses out there. They funded themselves selling erotica. A year and a half ago, we published a political romance inspired by Michele Bachmann by the poet Trey Sager. It was called Fires of Siberia, and we had a lot of fun doing it. So we thought, Why not explicitly use the model of Olympia Press to do a series of erotic romance books? We’ll focus on women writers, publish them as paperbacks and e-books, and see what we get. Why focus on women writers? They write better erotica. We read some manuscripts written by men. We didn’t like them. Read More
March 10, 2015 On the Shelf Fell That Fairy, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Richard Dadd, The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke (detail), 1855–64. The Warburg Institute, which dates to 1900, is one of Britain’s most peculiar libraries; in its radically open stacks, astrological guides sidle up to astronomy textbooks and science lives with magic. “In the past several years, the Warburg’s future has been fiercely contested. It is in some senses a small and parochial struggle, right out of Trollope’s Barchester novels, and in others about something very big—about the future of private visions within public institutions, about what memory is and what we owe it, about how to tell when an original vision has become merely an eccentric one.” Richard Dadd was a promising British painter who went insane in the 1840s. He made his painting The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke in an asylum. “It is an exhaustingly complex image, with a substantial cast of characters, none of whom are doing much … If the Fairy Feller were a work intended for critical interpretation, which it probably was not, then we might talk of the suspended action with which the seed was to be split; the deferred moment of sex; the mutual isolation of the groups of figures suggesting the impossibility of generating a family or a community; and we might connect these themes to Dadd’s awareness of his own position as a long-stay patient in London’s high-security lunatic asylum.” The art of the continuation novel: Why do dead authors’ estates hire contemporary writers to imitate them? “The value of characters … often exceeds the value of an author’s original texts … In recent years Sebastian Faulks has written as P.G. Wodehouse, William Boyd as Ian Fleming, Sophie Hannah as Agatha Christie, Anthony Horowitz as Arthur Conan Doyle, and more … The literary brand, today, is a managed and controlled phenomenon. A dead author’s reach on social media (managed by their estate or publisher) can be vast. The person or people who control Socrates’ Facebook page have access to nearly 1.5 million people.” “Good metaphors force you to think about the things they reference in fresh ways. There aren’t very many good ones, though. They’re mostly concocted for the purpose of coercing you into changing your opinion. They annoy and distract rather than illuminate.” On the Underground Man, everyone’s favorite antihero: “Certainly, the author identified strongly with his protagonist, calling him the ‘real man of the Russian majority.’ Dostoevsky rejected the idea that people act in accordance to reason or their best interests and asserted the need for them to be able to behave as they choose, without fitting into Enlightenment ideas of ‘progress.’ ”
March 9, 2015 Events This Tuesday: Paul Beatty and Lorin Stein in Conversation By Dan Piepenbring New Yorkers: join us tomorrow at McNally Jackson, where our editor Lorin Stein will appear in conversation with Paul Beatty. Paul’s new novel, The Sellout, is out now; the Guardian calls it “a galvanizing satire of post-racial America,” and Sam Lipsyte noted its “spectacular explosion of comic daring, cultural provocation, brilliant, hilarious prose, and genuine heart.” The event begins at seven P.M. See you there!
March 9, 2015 The ‘Mating’ Book Club Introducing the Mating Book Club By Dan Piepenbring On April 7, at our annual Spring Revel, we’re honoring Norman Rush with our Hadada Prize, presented each year to “a distinguished member of the writing community who has made a strong and unique contribution to literature.” To celebrate, the Daily is hosting a book club of sorts. Starting next Monday, March 16, we’re running a series of posts about Rush’s seminal 1991 novel, Mating. Twice a week, from start to finish, we’ll have writers examine a twenty-five-page installment of the book—not just to discuss the plot, but to offer the same spirit of reflection, debate, and restless inquiry that animates the novel itself. Whether you’re an avid fan of the book or completely new to it, we invite you to read along. Read More
March 9, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent 20/20 By Sadie Stein The offending glasses. My grandfather liked to talk about how much uglier Americans used to be. “People were ugly!” he would say with relish. “You have no idea now!” As children, we would always try to refute his claims, citing examples of modern celebrities we considered unattractive. But he would have none of it. “You don’t know,” he said darkly. To hear him tell it, the bit of Arkansas where he grew up was straight out of a Carson McCullers novel—which, I suppose, makes it sort of noteworthy that when a circus came to town, it was my grandfather who was considered such a dead ringer for the sideshow attraction Moe-Joe the Dog-Faced Boy that he bore this name for the rest of his life. I don’t know if Grandpa Moe was thinking of improved dentistry, malnutrition, or various dermatological conditions; maybe a combination. I can’t help wondering if, also, some people just couldn’t see themselves, so they cared less. After all, regular, exact prescription updates are a modern luxury, too, to say nothing of contacts and laser surgeries. Read More